Tag Archives: Mantic Terrain Crate

My plans to get a ton of exciting Heroes and Villains done in December have had a few large wrenches thrown in the works, and as a result, I haven’t really painted for almost a week. Getting back into it, I decided to work on some simple stuff that had been sitting around in the way on my painting desk – in this case, more Mantic Terrain Crate scatter pieces.

Two different types of barricade – and three of each. I varied the colours just a little in order for them to be a little unique and not just look like clone-pieces. I kept them all to natural, “woody” tones, and this time I varied the crates and barrels a little from the tones I’ve used in previous sets.

As you can see, they’re not exactly scales as proper barricades – more in a boardgame scale, if anything. Our model here is Forlong the Fat, one of GW’s “true-ish”-scale, LotR models. Even though he’s positioned behind them and is raised by a slottabase, you van see that they’re not exactly very big as far as barricades go. I’m sure they’ll be fine as generic scatter, though.

The other pieces are much less interesting – three larger keg barrels and three sets of triple-keg barrel stacks. Dark wood here, with brassy taps. While the barricades will easily make a bit of extra colour in fantasy wargames as well as dungeon scenery, these keg-barrels are a fair bit more limited. If we ever need to kit out a tavern for a game, we’ll certainly have a well-stocked booze supply!

Finally, some chests that I made myself finish off, after they’ve been sitting around for 6 months or so. These are from the Conan Miniatures Boardgame, by Monolith. I remember some time ago in the comments, someone (Dagger & Brush, from memory) suggesting that I could paint some of the chests in a set I had in different colours to distinguish the quality of them. Rather than paint the same model chests in different colours, I decided to make these slightly more fancy coffer sculpts a little more fancy in turn when it came to their paint. Baal Pteor, also from the Conan game provides us with our scale in this shot.

A bit of an intermission post today. I’ve already spent a few hours assembling the Community Round-Up post from November, and with luck it’ll be done tomorrow. I’ve got 10/17(18) people’s stuff done so far. Anyway, here’s some (more) bits of simple scatter from Mantic Games’ Terrain Crates. Beregond of Gondor and an unnamed Reiksgard on foot provide us with scale.

First up are the treasure piles. Useful for Role-playing, and perhaps games like Frostgrave. I’ve attempted to make them just subtly different from one another, and I’ve painted the odd coin silver in the piles to give them a fractionally less uniform look. Kind of like when you pick out the odd brick when doing a brick wall. Something often not directly noticeable because it looks more natural. I may add some gemstone paints to the armoured breastplate-things in the front middle two. Not sure. Any thoughts?

Finally, a couple of more detailed shots of the armour stacks. The PVC is thin and bendy, and my heat-resets didn’t stick. Yes, I could replace them with wire and so forth, but as with many of these things – they’re not worth the time it would take to do so, especially since these took WAY longer for me to get finished than I’d originally intended – about 2 months, when I’d hoped for a weekend – that’s what happens when something is pretty much “meh” in terms of how much it excites me to paint. Adding wire to them would just make all of that even worse and further dragged out. In the end, they look decent with the paint and the decals – and most importantly of all – the bloody things are done!

An underwheming scatter terrain post today! These two storage tanks were originally started back during (and for) Technical August but not completed. In fact, they’ve sat around annoyingly taking up space ever since, so I finally got them to a (slightly shitty) tabletop standard last weekend. I’d actually fished them out of the tub they’d been sitting in since I lost interest after August, to try and get them done for Mechanical November, but that didn’t work out, either. As part of Technical August’s theme, I tried using transparent paints over a silver base to see what kinds of effects I could achieve, inspired by the Bacta (healing) tank from Star Wars, specifically the Empire Strikes Back. The “water” is gemstone turquoise (or sapphire?) by Warcolours over the silver, while the “empty space” is Warcolours’ transparent white. The turquoise worked …okay, but the white seems to have been a bit of a failure.

Of course. “real” Bacta tanks are filled to the top (and feature adults wearing nappies inside them), but I felt that if I “filled” these to the top then they’d just look like they were painted blue. In the end, they’re pretty rough and not to the scatter terrain standard that I like to adhere to – but at a tabletop gameplay distance they’ll look …fine. Still, experiments by definition can’t always be a success, so I’m just calling these done and getting them the hell away from my painting desk. I’ve still got a few more of these things. I think they’ll be painted grey with some “warning” decals on them. I think those will actually look pretty decent. When I get around to them.

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